The present invention relates to filesystem management, and more particularly to declaring and managing records on a filesystem.
Many businesses and government offices have a need to monitor activities involving documents and other files on their computer systems. One reason for such monitoring is to improve the security of the documents. Monitoring may also be used to ensure compliance with certain laws and regulations by showing access or lack of access by business employees to particular documents and information. The monitoring may include what files are being accessed, what actions are being performed on the files and who is performing the actions. As an example, a business may wish to ensure that a particular contract document is not modified after a particular point in time (e.g., once both parties agree to the terms of the contract). By monitoring and logging activities involving the document, the business may later show that no modifications were made to the terms of the document after the particular point in time. As a second example, a particular document may contain privileged information that, if viewed by certain employees of the business, may result in certain legality issues (e.g., insider trading). Thus, the business may wish to monitor and log all accesses to the document, in order to later show that a particular user did or did not view the contents of the document.
Although businesses and government agencies may have a need to monitor all filesystem activity occurring on their computer systems, one challenge to such monitoring is that such computer systems may not always be connected to the network. That is, while one existing technique for monitoring such records is through the use of a centralized record management server on which all files are kept, such a solution requires users to have an active network connection in order to access the record management server. However, in the modern workplace environment, many employees are travelling and working remotely on a regular basis. Accordingly, such a network connection to the centralized record management server may not always be available. A further limitation of such a solution is that the centralized record management server cannot monitor files created locally on a user's computer, especially when the user is working offline. For instance, if a user accesses a local copy of a document when working offline, the record management server has no way of knowing of the access, much less logging or preventing the access.